“Always, my queen and my lady,” and he kissed the white fingers once.

“Hullo!” shouted the Duke, emerging from the cuddy.  “Upon my word!  Why, it’s dinner time.”

CHAPTER X.

How they left the good yacht Streak, and how they bade a hearty farewell to that old sea lion Captain Sturleson, and how they went through the hundred and one formalities of the custom-house, and the thousand and one informalities of its officials, are matters of interest indeed, but not of history.  There are moments in a man’s existence when the act of conveying half a dozen sovereigns to the pocket of that stern monitor of good faith, the brass-buttoned custom-house officer with the tender conscience, is of more importance to salvation than women’s love or the Thirty-nine Articles.  All this they did.  Nor were they spared by the great tormentor of the West, who bristleth with the fretful quill, whose ears surround us in the night-time, and whose voice is as the voice of the charmer, the reporter of the just and the unjust, but principally of the latter.  And Mr. Barker made an appointment with the Duke, and took a tender farewell of the three ladies, and promised to call on Claudius in the afternoon, and departed.  But the rest of the party went to a famous old hotel much affected by Englishmen, and whose chief recommendation in their eyes is that there is no elevator, so that they can run upstairs and get out of breath, and fancy themselves at home.  Of course their apartments had been secured, and had been waiting for them a week, and the Countess was glad to withdraw for the day into the sunny suite over the corner that was hers.  As for Miss Skeat, she went to the window and stayed there, for America was quite different from what she had fancied.  Claudius descended to the lower regions, and had his hair cut; and the cook and the bar-keeper and the head “boots,” or porter, as he called himself, all came and looked in at the door of the barber’s shop, and stared at the huge Swede.  And the barber walked reverently round him with scissors and comb, and they all agreed that Claudius must be Mr. Barnum’s new attraction, except the head porter—­no relation of an English head porter—­who thought it was “Fingal’s babby, or maybe the blessed Sint Pathrick himself.”  And the little boy who brushed the frequenters of the barber’s shop could not reach to Claudius’s coat collar, so that the barber had to set a chair for him, and so he climbed up.

The Duke retired also to the depths of his apartments, and his servant arrayed him in the purple and stove-pipe of the higher civilisation.  And before long each of the ladies received a large cardboard box full of fresh-cut flowers, sent by Mr. Barker of course; and the Duke, hearing of this from his man, sent “his compliments to Lady Victoria, and would she send him a rose for his coat?” So the Duke sallied forth on foot, and the little creases in his clothes showed that he had just arrived.  But he did not attract any attention, for the majority of the population of New York have “just arrived.”  Besides, he had not far to go.  He had a friend in town who lived but a few steps from the hotel, and his first move on arriving was generally to call there.